A House of Simpletons?

By

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh

Protagoras, the ancient Greek sophist was not alone when he crowned man the measure of all things- Homo omnia mensura”. The Hebrew Psalmist too, shared this pristine truth and vision in all its entirety. In the hallowed songs of the 8^th Psalm, he sang in praise of his God, while submitting one of the most elevating religious anthropologies, ever put on paper. The Psalmist after observing the heavens in awe, and all other works fashioned by the creator; came upon man himself; bowing to the incomprehensible mystery before him, he asked: „What is man that you care for him”.., You made him little less than a god, with honour and glory, You crowned him ” (Ps. 8). This trend over flooded its Hebraic banks to irrigate the conceptual universe of Christian writers. The good old St. Ireneus, one of the great early Christian writers, in an attempt to better appreciate the position of the Psalmist summarized these great standpoints in a few alliteratively rhythmic words: “The glory of God is man fully alive”. Jesus the Christ in the same spirit recognized and gave full expression to the primary mission of God or Nature in its immensity, as the welfare of man. To this end, he reminded all history in the 10^th chapter of the Gospel of St. John, the apostle of love, saying; “I came that they may have life and have it most abundantly” This is to say, that Whoever made man crowned him with some integrity, honour and a certain divinity, which he brings to bear on certain, if not all dimensions of his social existence. To this end, any social structure which conduces to the dehumanization of man, or any apparatus of state that curtails or circumscribes man’s enjoyment of full existence and welfare, in suffocating degradation is totally unacceptable. It is a sin in religion. Philosophy abhors it. Ethics and logic view it as diametrically untenable. The question then coagulates into a fossilized currency: Why does some structure crafted for human welfare degenerate in certain climes, to become instruments of human exploitative denigration? A legislative instance would essay to clarify our meaning here.

Man mirrors and epitomizes in himself, the summary of God or Nature, when he sits in to legislate. He clothes himself in the apparel of the gods, when he sits in on the tribunes of legislation to make laws for the order and good government of his society. This construction is informed by, and gains credence upon the fact that Nature is the greatest lawmaker. In the pristine foundations of creation, nature installed a refined medley of laws, which holds and sustains the universe in being. Hence, our galaxy and every other galaxy in all the solar systems making up the awesome immensity of our universe, know their defined path or orbit; attends punctually to it, and cannot deviate there from. The Waters know their levels and would not wish to deviate there from save for man’s unsustainable exploitation of his environment. In the subatomic universe, the atoms equally knew their groove and religiously follow it. Physical laws bath and crisscross the universe even to the furthest portals of its microcosmic ramifications. Laws like gravity, laws of motion, uncertainty principle, etc are some of these physical laws that forestall our universe imploding into a cosmic anarchy that would spell the end of time, as we know it. Laws are ontologically necessary for order and good governance of the universe. That is why nature remains the first lawmaker. Every creature then took up this metaphysical refrain. Laws guide our actions. When and where they seem to be absent, we are compelled to either invent some, in consultation with the reality surrounding us, or we open up ourselves to self-destruction in an anarchic whirlpool of social irreconcilable dissonance.

Nature as it holds and applies here is to be construed, though not too strictly, in the Spinozian sense of God or Nature-“Deus sive Natura“ This then introduces us to the lofty esteem in which the art of law making is held in the metaphysical and religious concourse of all cultures and creeds. In Greek and Roman Mythologies, Mount Olympia or its Latinized equivalent Olympus serves as the hallowed seat of the gods, presided over by Zeus or Jupiter. This amphitheatre, in Homeric tradition is home to a celestial equivalent of the intrigue and immoralities of earthly, corporeal, profane or mundane imperial courts. Despite this, the prepotence of the gods pontificate and holds sway from these holy hills, which is the parliament of the gods. This parliament brooks no affront to its divine authority; it cannot be belittled without superlatively unpleasant consequences. The gods approved Julius Caesar’s death sentence, the moment he bore the dignity of this parliament lightly. The malevolent wrath of the gods brewed itself to ferociously irrevocable levels, at that unguarded moment, when Caesar’s pride overtook his reason; and he, in a fit of tyrannical anger unwittingly stretched the boundaries of his finitude too far as to equate the irrevocability of his laws to that of the celestial parliament, that sits eternally on the Olympian heights. The conspirators headed by Brutus, whose treachery and terrible acts, rose in reprehensible ignominy to lend his name, as the etymological root, for the derivation of the English word “Brutal”, saw some dangerous tyrannical strains in Caesar’s bearings. They would not have succeeded had the gods not lent a hand to their conspiracies. The gods would have weighed in for Caesar consequent upon their love and admiration of him. To prove their love and deference of him, they allowed a soothsayer, an apparitional peep into the grand designs of the conspiracy being hatched against him, as to enable him warn the great Caesar. “Beware the Ides of March”(Julius Caesar, Act 1 Sc.11), shouted the geriatric soothsayer to Caesar’s hearing. Caesar, who by then was in the fatal thraldom of his pride, waved the warning aside as a pie meant exclusively for cowards. The gods did not stop there. They made Caesar’s wife privy, through dreams to the unprecedented misfortune that awaits her husband, were his steps not retraced on his dangerous march to the Capital. Caesar’s wife battled nightmares and bad dreams on the eve of the murder in her bedchamber. She woke up to beg Caesar not to go to the capital on that day. Caesar refused. He like all men of power and means, regarded his wife’s excessive concern, as a bout of the normal hysteria native to the emotional dimensions of human psyche, and so spaciously and most liberally resident in the feminine part of our race. The gods persevered. As Caesar was about to enter the capital, Artemidorius ran up to him with a note that revealed the conspiracy. Caesar, like a sailor drunk with the dipsomanic crapulence of his self-importance and immortality; Caesar paid no heed. He neither took, nor opened, let alone reading the note. As he made his way into the capital, he passed this old man who warned him “it is the ides of March”. Caesar ignored him. He bounced into the senate, with the proud bearing of a victorious conqueror. He went into a chamber ordained by law for the enactment of laws. On that gruesome day, the temple of laws turned into scene of blue, cold-blooded murder. Disregarding all admonitions, the conqueror went into the senate and there; was conquered by the conspiracy of jealous men.

Not heeding the warning of the gods was Caesar’s first mistake. He could have survived. The gods could still have helped him; save for the fact that blinded by the pride of his achievements and greatness, he bore the seat of the gods lightly. The conspirators wanted a code, as well as a wooden justification for their impending crime. They needed a sign that would signal and direct all their daggers of treachery simultaneously into Caesar’s body, so that the synchronized blows will deal the great Caesar some mortal injuries; spill his royal blood and wound him fatally as to necessarily and decisively compromise his body’s ability to support the fragile ligaments of his soul. They searched for a code as well as a justification, but could not come upon any, until they asked Caesar to repeal his banishment of Publius Cimber. In the feigned and pretended patronage native to the treacherous countenance of most proximately potential murderers, Cassius pleaded with Caesar to reconsider a stance that was cast irrevocably in granite recalcitrance. He being Caesar’s friend, more than any other person, knew that such Caesarean stance couldn’t brook any reconsideration. Though Metelius Cimber was the first to enter a plea for his brother before the great Caesar, other conspirators joined in cosmetic courtesy, to plead for a banished man, in the presence of a man they were primed to murder in a few seconds. Caesar may have still received the patronage of the gods in any imagined form, had he firmly and humbly dismissed their requests. He did not. Rather to stamp the finality of his decision in the timorous sands of their minds, he told them that he can only change his decision, when they are able to earn the power and the divine effrontery, which could safeguard them from the angry wraths of blasphemed and apostatized gods of their world and on the same breath undertake an impossible project. These impossible criteria for gaining Caesar’s reconsideration of Cimber’s banishment, was summed up in those words brimming with arrogance: “Hence wilt thou lift up Olympus ” (Act 3, Sc.1) Olympus one must remember, is the holy seat and parliament of the gods. It is an impossibility to lift up a mountain. Caesar should have left it at that. His crime here was that he emphasized or rather advertised this seal of his decision’s finality, by juxtaposing it with the lifting of the seat of the gods, which is not only an impossibility, but is equally an atrocity to simply entertain a thought of doing that. A contemplation of an ugly action against the gods constitutes in itself, an unwarranted and unpardonable insult on the eternal tenants of that celestial abode. And for his punishment, Caesar was abandoned to the capricious wiles and murderous tastes of the conspirators. They wasted no time. In a few seconds, Brutus murdered friendship, with the daggers of blazing treachery. On that day of infamy, Rome lost one of her greatest sons and General, as the great Caesar lay down to die, in frozen immobility; haemorrhaging his life’s blood onto the cold stones of the senate floors. A few moments after the first dagger thrusts, Caesar bowed to finitude: very dead. All because he desecrated and blasphemed against the great celestial legislative symbol of the Roman gods.

But today many Nigerian senators and MPs have committed worse crimes in those hallowed sanctuaries of democracy, yet they are still walking the streets, bearing their inglorious selves with a bloated air of self-importance, which is simply emptiness and dishonour in motion. The custodians of our laws have debased and rape our mandate. They have committed a progressive range of unpardonable blasphemies against justice, equity and good conscience. They have converted our democratic symbols into instruments for the worship of avarice. They have borne the people’s pain lightly, as their comprehensive looting of the national weal has really essayed to crush the masses further into the mires and quicksands of poverty and chill penury. Their abandonment of their democratically assigned role has reconverted Nigeria into a civilian dictatorship, where executive recklessness is law. Words are notoriously inadequate to convey or project the depth of decadence that our legislative symbols have undergone at the hands of these “honourable” men of easy virtue. The fact remains that our watchdog has convoked a meal off the bone, we collectively hung on its neck for safekeeping. The Mouse we depended on for the security of our collective pieces of fish, has devoured not only the fish, but has also irredeemably corroded our trust in his goodwill. Those who claim to fight for or represent the people in Nigeria have turned around to feed on the people. No good legislation has ever arisen from them to stem the tide of turbulent poverty sweeping the people away into a very deep sea of frustration. The price of the basic food staples is astronomically exorbitant. The price of fuel is beyond the reach of an average Nigerian. There exist gross and pervasive insecurity of lives and property across the length and breadth of land. Fake drugs and fake food products despite the excellent battles of Dora Akunyili are ravaging thousand of Nigerian families. The roads are festivals of potholes as thousands of innocent Nigerians are condemned to untimely death yearly consequent on these stretches generously strewn with gaping potholes. The hospitals having lost every pretence of being mere consulting clinics are now where people go to die or where dead Nigerians are dumped. Little wonder the mortuaries and the Obituary sections of our media are now the great money-spinners in an economy that is on its way to hell. The legislature stands by in timorous inaction while all these forces conspire to deny Nigerians a life worth living; a life that should be the glory of God because Man should be fully alive.

Caesar was a great Roman. Most of these Nigerians MP’s in question are the worst dregs of convoluted avarice and indefatigable selfishness. Caesar made Rome great. These debauched Nigerians stole, and are still stealing Nigeria blind. Caesar made every Roman citizen proud of his heritage. These Nigerians have battered Nigeria ’s image to the extent that defies every attempt at rehabilitation. These are the people and the house we are going to appraise.

At the birth of democracy, parliaments or House of laws, arose as the hallowed sanctuaries representative of the people’s mandate. In these sacred halls, the people’s mandate is deployed to craft legislations that are naturally meant to conduce to the peace, order and good government of the people. Since law making issues from the cores of nature; and since God is the great law maker, whenever man steps to act in his stead, that action becomes a sacred function and the place where the action takes places, a sacred precinct. This is the metaphysical base that makes the parliament a sacred sanctuary of the people’s will. The founding Fathers of the United States of America were intuitively at home with, and ever aware of the sacredness of their mandate and function, as bearers of the collective aspirations of the people. And to emblazon this for eternal reference and remembrance for themselves and their posterity, they wrote it down in the grundnorm of their unity, prefacing it with these hallowed words: WE THE PEOPLE …In order to form a more PERFECT UNION; establish JUSTICE, INSURE DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, provide for the common defence, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE, and SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO OURSELVES AND OUR POSTERITY, do ordain and establish this Constitution::: These few words beautifully articulate their awe before such onerous and sacred task. Every word employed there has something ethereal and metaphysical about it.

That is the glory, majesty and beauty of the legislature. It is a house built for good sense, a citadel of service, the soul of government and the engine of democracy. A parliament or legislature, according to John Pym “is that to the Commonwealth which the soul is to the body”. And for him, “It behoves us therefore to keep the facility of that soul from distemper” This is the spirit that holds and obtains in houses of legislature, in the course of democratic evolution. The legislature under whatever name has in history midwifed men of great intellect, incorruptible moral convictions and impeccable integrity. A roll of honour for great men of learning and character that have graced the glorious halls of various parliaments across the world would see men like Demosthenes in Greece , and Cicero of Rome. These two ancient greats may be centuries away in our memories, but other more contemporary examples like Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli, equally recommend themselves to our admiration.

But all these lofty values came to Nigeria and were crucified. Turbulent questions have continually plagued my digestion in relation to the kind of rot that has continually bedevilled the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as their equivalents at the State and local government levels in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Hence the question: Are these Houses peopled by simpletons, Social vandals and avaricious plunderers? Or is it a theatre of the absurd, wherever shade of laughable and questionable character pitches a tent? If these hypothetical quizzes that I have trembled to ventilate are not objective, could anyone then tell me what men like Arthur Nzeribe are doing there in the senate? What business do people like him have in the holy precincts of the temple of laws? What are other national criminals, whose notorious reputations stink to high heavens doing in these places? I am yet to fathom how a man who won (a) n (s) election on a stolen mandate could rise to become a senate president, simply because Obasanjo needs a rubber stamp. I am yet to understand what other men whose academic qualifications were obtained on borrowed intelligence, doing there too. When a criminal becomes a lawmaker, it would be unforgivable foolishness to expect the canonization of virtue. The least we can expect are legal approvals to state plunder. Under regimes as this, crime is on its way to securing a legislative fiat. Once this is enthroned as an unwritten policy of state, crime will automatically lose its reprehensible recompense and metamorphose into a cottage industry. We know that crime only pays because the government does not run it.

The myopia and poverty of ideas dominating our decision making bodies in Nigeria are simply attributable to fact that as the sun was setting for the military government in Nigeria, a network of crooked variables were busy rigging themselves into positions from where they could impose questionable characters to represent their avaricious blueprints on the pretext of representing the people. It is only in the Nigerian house of simpletons that millions of naira was scandalously mapped out for furniture allowance, which fell under the very first major preoccupation of the national assembly of a country where over 85% of the people are summaries of poverty. Here the legislators embarked on a looting spree of the national treasury under the smokescreens of furniture allowance. The convulsively ugly nature of the amount mapped to that effect juxtaposed with the chill penury afflicting the Nigerian masses then, portrayed these lawmakers as scandalous vampires and mean spirited parasites out to suck and bleed Nigeria and Nigerians to death. It is only in Nigeria that a speaker of the House of representative forged academic qualifications and nobody found out until he became a speaker. And instead of going to jail for his crimes, he was so hastily granted a state pardon, that was simply a product of political harlotry that is the norm in Nigeria . This gross violator of the sacrosanctity of the second estate of our realm, instead of losing his head to a political guillotine, to appease the gods of Nigeria ’s destiny, benefited from a politically porous pardon that mocked justice and ripped equity asunder. By that singular act, we told criminals that the higher and more connected you, the easier it is for you to escape the wrathful recompense of the law. All these happened in a country where the crème of our youths who out of hunger and frustration induced by excruciating social realities that reduced their horizons of opportunity, were forced into petty stealing to forestall hunger and its unpleasant consequences, are rotting in jail, endlessly awaiting trial. Such legal mutilations in the case of Salisu Buhari, who seemed to have a history of forgery, constitutes not only a mockery of justice, but unwittingly prepared the ground for the emergence of brazen crooks like Chris Ubah, who would roundly insult democracy and its sacred institutions by committing the treasonable felony of kidnapping a sitting governor, and get away with it; lending credence to Herman Melvilles observation that “Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passports; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers”.

It is only in Nigeria that a speaker of the house could spend 19 million naira for a two day Salah celebrations, when his salary for one year is not up to that amount and more so when the people whose mandate he stole, cannot put two decent square meals on the table or afford some pieces of meat for their own Salah celebration. Is it not only in Nigeria that a man accused of murder could contest an election from Prison and win a senatorial seat to that effect? Is it not only in Nigeria that the welfare of the masses takes the back seats of irrelevance in the legislature as personal interests of the legislators take the front seat? Nigeria , which is the 6th largest crude oil exporter in the world, cannot afford her citizens some basic prime motor spirit for their cars and kerosene for their cooking, while the legislator looks on in myopia. The excruciating and strangulating economic burden that this places on the people is not even of concern to these legislators; hence no laws or legislation have emanated from them to address this issue of perennial and vital concern to the wellbeing of Nigerians. This is to tell Nigerians that these people have formed a new core group of scavenging elites, whose primary industry is to band together in defence of their common avaricious interests, which is simply a lavatorial assault on the mandate of those who they claim to represent. It is in this spirit that the House of Representatives during the certificate forgery saga of Salisu Buhari, rose up on Wednesday, the 14^th of July 1999 , to give Buhari a standing ovation, after his wooden denials of the allegations against him. The legislators violated logic and reason, which requires the accused to tender evidence in his defence. Buhari did no such thing before this harrowed legislators, who as a criminal gang would, were hell bent on protecting one of their own, and shielding him from the exposure, which may signal the knell that summons each of them to equal exposure as well.

Do we need to go into sterile reminiscences of the corrupt tussle for power in the senate, which saw Evans Enwerem being kicked out after some months as the President; through to the Okadigbo who was too-independent minded to be Obasanjo’s pliable plastercine; and finally to the Pius Anyim whose active collusion completed the triumvirate of fraud, made up of Obasanjo, Anyim and Na Abba that doctored and mutilated the Electoral Act 2001, to the unfair and criminal advantage of the PDP? Do we need to recount the contract scandals that embroiled the senate or the bribery allegation scandal preferred against Nzeribe and Governor Odili respectively during some of the OBJ’s impeachment saga?

I have resisted the temptation to state that Nigerian legislature at all levels has been desecrated. It has been turned into a huge distribution agency, where unfortunate characters sleep through legislative sessions and are only awake in the backrooms where deals on contracts are cut. One then begins to wonder, whether the people would for all intents and purposes elect contractors to go and represent their interests at the national level. The stench of corruption coming from those chambers at Abuja is really insulting to any civilized mind. This people are simply not accountable to anybody. All they care for is their own share of the national cake. Once the presidency refuses to come up with the right amount of lubricants; namely money, with which to grease their greedy fingers, then impeachment threats threaten to overawe our airwaves. They use to flash the humbling papers of impeachment before Obasanjo for him to go about sending them their parts of the booty with immediate effect. Once this side of the deal is settled, Obasanjo can go on committing his unpardonable crimes against democracy, and urinating on our hallowed values, none of them cares. They have been bridled with the filthy lucre of corruption. Their watchdog and checkmating roles having been compromised by their greed and dishonour are jettisoned. Nigeria can go to hell or become Obasanjo’s toilet; nobody cares. The annoying aspect of all these is that we never begged any of them to represent us. All of them presented themselves and begged us to allow them represent our aspirations at the house of democracy. So many of them whom we rejected by our popular votes, stole our mandate by re-engineering the election results in collusion with INEC and the PDP rigging machine; one of the best and largest rigging machines in Africa. They do not represent us without pay. All them are paid to do that job. Yet, there is nothing to justify their salaries and jumbo allowances, which is seriously taking some unprecedented toll on Nigerians. They enjoy a kind of sickening sybaritic lifestyle, which bellies and insults the predicament of the common Nigerians in the streets. They live in opulent quarters and flamboyant neighbourhoods, which seems to insulate them from the fact that so many Nigerians are tenants compelled by unpleasant economic circumstances to reside under bridges in Lagos; in dehumanizing slums like Ajegunle; in the streets, like the retired soldiers that ply their poverty, sleeping in front of the defence headquarters in Abuja; and in the major markets, bus terminals and major street intersections daily advertising their poverty and disabilities to gain the sympathetic crumbs of generous passers-by for their daily bread. Their paradisiacal living environment immunizes their consideration to the fact that Nigerians are victims of the arbitrary rent regimes of shylock landlords. To this end, they have not crafted any comprehensively pragmatic legislation to will enable Nigerians to have decent shelter over their heads, at an affordable price. All they do is to acquire choice buildings, lands and property for themselves, while these poor Nigerians are pushed further down the miry pits of hopelessness.

Our “honourable” law makers ride in pleasure cars with tinted glasses, which equally blind them from seeing the naked plight of these hapless Nigerians, whom their legislative greed is helping to push further down the poverty slope. Where the roads are impassable, the employ the services of government funded Jeeps. This has further inoculated them against any resolve to craft a comprehensive transportation policy or law that would see to the development of a broad network of transportation possibilities, like railways, inland waterway system, airports and good well maintained roads network. Nigeria has the resources, what she lacks is the leadership and the imitative, which unfortunately we are paying these incompetent men for. I have come to believe that public-spirited initative, like love is a stranger in the house of avarice. I have equally come to concur with Milton Berle that “you can lead a man to congress, but you can’t make him think”

If these men consult their brains at all, they would have asked themselves, what they have been able to do to rescue the Nigerian economy from its unhealthy overdependence on oil and its consequent status as a mono-product economy. This is a pertinent question, in an age when countries like Germany is investing 550 million Euros, in the search for alternative sources of energy as to reduce their dependence on oil as well as reduce the environmental hazards posed by fossil fuel. They should have asked themselves what they have done as an Agricultural policy to put cheap, affordable and healthy food on the tables of Nigerians, and create jobs for our teeming army of unemployed youths. They should equally have asked themselves, what policies they have adopted to make Nigerian education more functional as to generate a self-employment capability in our graduates. None of these questions seem to be a consuming passion for these men. Their only passion is the next sitting allowance and the search for contracts that would turn them into multi-millionaires overnight. The trend today is that anyone who gets into the house immediately buys a new house and starts the building of three more simultaneously. It seems that there is a river of money flowing through the National Assembly. Little wonder, the contenders are so very willing and ready to kill to attain a senatorial or a house of reps seat.

At the state level, the assemblies have abandoned their watchdog positions to become the rubber stamp of incompetent state governors as well as the vendetta machines of irked State Chief executives. We can recount the impeachment saga across the country’s legislatures and their local government area counterparts. Today, Mr. Orji Uzor Kalu is pursuing his deputy Mr. Chima Nwafor, with all the boiling, corrosive and murderous venom of an enraged god. He is using the State legislature as his vendetta machine in that regard. This is the second time that Mr. Kalu is fighting to remove his deputy. The Kalu-controlled House of Assembly successfully impeached the first, Mr. Abaribe. The political head of the second Mr. Nwafor is now on the legislative slaughter slab, awaiting political decapitation. I would not want to recount the Federally supported attempt to unconstitutionally remove Ngige from office and the inglorious role played by the Anambra State House of Assembly in the Ngige-gate scandal.

Taking this detour is to enable me ask the most fundamental of questions as it applies to the Nigerian situation: What has these legislators done to help Nigerians and Nigeria out of its present socio-political, ethno-religious and economic quagmire? Nigeria is still marooned on the sandbanks of rot at all levels, and I am yet to see the creation of the relevant laws and relevant structures by the legislature to lead the assault on the forces that are militating against our rise to prominence. What legislation has our national assembly or their state and local government area counterparts passed aimed at eviscerating unemployment and creating jobs for our teeming youthful population? What have they done to the appalling health care delivery system in Nigeria ? What about our social hygiene which corruption has laid prostrate? Not that they have not done anything concrete in this regard, they seem to be the worst examples of what their anti-corruption Act is made to fight. The Nigerian situation challenges anybody to point out to one, useful, pragmatic legislation that has issued from our legislature. What value have the Nigerian tax payers derived for the billions of their naira, recurrently being spent on the wages and upkeep of these dysfunctional bunch of corrupt, lazy and plundering legislators? None. Many of these legislators only know the boundaries of their constituencies on paper. Many of them spend precious legislative hours sleeping through the proceedings. Many of are very busy amassing fleets of pleasure cars, acquiring and changing our young university girls as daily mistresses without conjugal rights or portfolio, to satisfy their lascivious appetites and lewd sexual insecurities. Others are now land prospectors, acquiring choice landed properties in the choice neighbourhoods of our major cities. Today, to be a (n) “(dis) honourable” member of any House translates to rotten flamboyance and insulting affluence, all to intimidate those whose servants they ought to be in the first place.

This harrowing incompetence and dysfunctional inaction summarized in our legislators apart from constituting an insult to the lofty principles of democratic governance, seems to consolidate the politically pessimistic views of Gore Vidal when he defined politics as made up of two words: “Poli” which is Greek for “Many” and “tics”, which are blood sucking insects. Our legislature seems to be the playground of many blood sucking socio-political “Insects”. That is the only reason, that the country they have been piloting is bringing the rear in the world poverty index.

I think that these men should be told in no clear terms that Nigerians have had enough of their tomfoolery. Their unprincipled vacillations and political directionless ness is really compromising our welfare and that of our posterity. The legislature is a House of laws and not a den of debauched thieves. Politics should be about ethics. Hiding under the slogan that politics is a dirty game to perpetrate their avaricious regimes is a tendency, which is unacceptable in the score of manners. Politics is only dirty for a man whose vision and prefabricated prejudice is gravitated by corruption. Politics is a human act. And all human acts are inspired by ethical considerations for them to be worth the while. Aristotle one of the greatest philosophers of all times was well aware of the fact, that politics and ethics are inseparable Siamese twins. One dies the death of debauchery when divorced from the other. He sought no better platform than his Nicomachean Ethics to announce to the world that Man is a political animal. To this end, our legislators should better sit up and be alive to their responsibilities or take an honourable bow out of the scene by handing in their resignations. Politics should have some philosophy, and should not be abandoned to the whims and caprices of avaricious and egocentric hedonism. Plato essayed in his Republic to bridge any conceptual chasm between politics and philosophy. Paraphrasing these thoughts many centuries later, Abraham, Lincoln opined that those who desire to rule men must arm themselves with the power that wisdom and knowledge gives. Philosophers should become Kings or Kings become philosophers. This Platonic insight has not lost its touch in our world of today. The Nigerian legislators should either get wedded to justice and selflessness which are the fundamental basics of ethics, which impregnates every responsible politicking or they should get out of there. The Nigerian people remain the ultimate sovereign and repositories of power. Our house of parliament should suffer no more desecrations at the hands of misfits and inglorious men. It should prove itself to be above a mere conglomeration of simpletons out to satisfy their yawning and unquenchable greed. We really need a new direction. I hope someone is listening.